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Saturday, September 1, 2012

One of the good things about summer, what's left of it, is insulation.

From noise.

This block of Henry Street is a hive of construction activity, with hard hatted drones at work on three sites nearby. Three connected townhouses have risen in the last year in the previously empty lot across the road, shielded from view by two enormous red oaks. The street has been ripped up in front of them - perhaps for sewer lines. Of an evening, the smell of hot tar hangs between the rooftops. Beside them, on the corner, a major renovation has been inching along in a grand old former hospital building - the townhouses are in what might have been its garden, long ago. And beside it, around the corner, another townhouse materialized from scratch, very narrow, very smart.

Down the road in the other direction the huge and rather entitled public school is enveloped in pale netting while an asbestos abatement project continues. At night.

After the lightning strike

And beyond it all, visible from the roof and terrace, the tower of stricken Christ Church is being removed painstakingly, stone by stone, window casing by window casing. It is now a blunt shell, the belfry exposed and vulnerable. They work around the clock. I can't imagine what it is costing, with two huge full time hoists and Clinton Street blocked to traffic for the duration. Our view is now bereft of the steeple's graceful points.

Double glazing and a rowdy air conditioner have not only kept me cool during the day but also oblivious of the outdoor ruckus. This will change soon, with the season. Good days of blue sky are in the offing. We have tasted them already. The sliding door will open, I will hear birds, sirens. And construction workers, including the one who whistles all day long. He's alright.

I have begun to practise my flute again, on the terrace. Perhaps he'll join me for a duet.

There is no bit of nip in the air this weekend, but next week will be nearly 10 degrees cooler. I know fall is still officially three weeks away, but somehow it seems to think that Labor Day is the real beginning. So nice to look forward to cooler days and bluer skies!

In House Blogs

Good Food Blogs

Reasons to Dogear a Page

We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

How will we know it's us without our past?

...How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know - and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assissi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?